Commentary

Losing 2026 Before It Starts: The Real Cost of a Wait and See Marketing Budget

• by Sarah VanHeirseele , Op-Ed Contributor, 5 hours ago

This isn’t a typical year-end budget delay.

For companies on a calendar-year fiscal, budgets are typically directionally set by October, adjusted in November, and finalized before Thanksgiving.

This year, many brands entered December with no clarity, no commitment, and no confidence in what comes next. More concerning, some are now heading into January in the same position.

Scopes are “verbally approved,” but nothing is signed. Plans exist in theory, but not in practice. Teams are told to be ready yet given no authority to move.

What’s different isn’t the economy. It’s how decisions are being made.

Marketing plans aren’t being debated, they’re being paused. Budgets aren’t being cut, they’re being held hostage to new product launches, M&A possibilities, board optics, and a growing fear of being wrong at the wrong time. The result is a new kind of paralysis. Brands technically have money, but no permission to use it.

And while leadership waits for certainty, the market keeps moving.

Decline begins long before the shelf.

Decline begins in memory. This is why mental availability, not short-term efficiency, becomes the real battleground when budgets stall. Most of any brand’s consumers are light and infrequent buyers, and they forget fast. They reach for the brand that comes to mind now because they’re seeing it.

On average, brands lose roughly 10 percent of market share in the first year without advertising, 20 percent by the second year, and close to 30 percent by the third, according to multiple Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Journal of Advertising Research studies.

Earlier this fall, we interviewed a cross-section of adult U.S. consumers and found 78% trust advertised brands more, while 54% forget brands that stop advertising. And in a controlled test, a single ad for a mid-tier cheese brand increased purchase intent by 43%.

There is nothing conservative about underinvesting.

Right now, media inflation has cooled and competitive noise has softened in many categories. This creates a rare moment where every dollar buys atypical reach and share of voice. Move now and you can gain ground. Wait and you’ll likely reenter a louder and more expensive marketplace with a smaller brand.

Budgeting approaches that feel responsible, such as percent of sales, competitive parity, or repeating last year’s spend, systematically underestimate what growth requires. They anchor decisions to habit and benchmarks rather than evidence.

Instead, base budgets on where your brand’s true response curve sits, and what the marginal return of the next incremental dollar is. To get those answers, bypass your benchmarks or dashboards and model spend against business outcomes over time, isolating how incremental dollars perform as investment scales.

If your budget is frozen or shrinking, here is how to respond.

This is not the moment to wait for clarity. It is the moment to walk into the C-suite with a clear, defensible plan grounded in evidence, not instinct.

Protect continuity above everything else. 

Even lean, continuous advertising outperforms stop-start strategies because mental availability erodes faster than sales data reveals. Once memory decays, recovery costs rise sharply.

Frame marketing as risk mitigation, not upside. 

Advertising is not just a growth lever. It is a risk-reduction tool. Sustained investment lowers price sensitivity, protects margin, and reduces the long-term cost of rebuilding demand. Cutting marketing may improve short-term optics, but it increases downside exposure and future capital requirements.

Concentrate where it counts. 

Underfunded media does not scale down gracefully. It collapses. When weekly reach drops below a critical threshold, brands stop reaching light buyers and begin advertising to the same people more often. If reductions are unavoidable, prioritize channels, assets, and moments that deliver real weekly reach and reinforce memory, not superficial efficiency.

Bring modeling, not anecdotes. 

Finance does not need belief. They need scenarios. Show what happens if spend is cut, held, or increased. Quantify the marginal return of incremental dollars, the cost of delay, and the upside of winning.

The most effective teams go further, modeling what earning even one additional share point would mean in revenue, margin, and long-term brand value. The goal is not to defend marketing. It is to make the tradeoffs visible, the risks explicit, and the growth opportunity concrete.